Page 12 of Summer Love

Dozens of boards are lined up on wooden racks—longboards, shortboards, foam boards for beginners. Wetsuits drip from a line strung between two posts, black and glistening. The ground is all sand and puddles.

Garden hose in hand, the singing man rinses a board. In his twenties, tall, broad, sun-browned skin, black hair knotted at the nape. Tattoos cover his arms and chest. He sets the clean board on the rack, grabs another, and starts waxing it—slow, circular strokes, in time with his song.

I’ve never seen him before.

Farther down, on the beach, a young woman with curly brown hair stands knee-deep in the water, ringed by four or five kids in oversized wetsuits. She lifts one of them by the armpits to set him back on his foam board, and her laugh carries up to me—open, warm, contagious.

Her, I don’t know either.

The Walkers’ old VW bus is parked near the entrance to the yard. Red with a cream roof, dented, covered in dust and surf stickers—the same ones as six years ago, plus a few newer layers. The same red-and-cream van he used to drive me around in—windows down, the smell of wax, the music too loud, my bare feet on the dash.

I swallow.

Next to the bus, an old turquoise trailer, sitting there like it’s always been part of the scenery, a small wooden deck out front and a board leaning against the side. I’ve never seen it before. Someone lives in the surf school yard, right under my windows.

The school’s still here, but the faces have changed. The tattooed guy, the woman on the beach—instructors who weren’t part of the picture six years ago.

Maggie Walker must have kept running the school, or handed it off to someone. He’s somewhere on the pro circuit. And Noah’s in med school in San Francisco, far from all this.

They’re gone. Life here kept going without them—and without me.

I lean against the windowsill and let the sea air fill my lungs.

Good. He’s not here. I can breathe. I can sell this house, wrap up my business, and leave without ever running into him.

Two weeks. You sell, you sign, you leave. He’s halfway around the world.

Ryan’s words finally click. “The beach is very active.” A kid squeals with joy as he topples off his board. “The immediate surroundings complicate things.” The tattooed guy launches into a new verse, louder. “Potential buyers are looking for a quieter setting.”

I look at the yard, the piled-up boards, the dripping wetsuits, the red bus, the turquoise trailer, the kids yelling.

Ah. So that’s it.

I close the window, then go back down, cross the dark hallway, and unlock the front door, on the beach side.

The yard explodes with light.

CHAPTER 5

Summer

The yard’s in worse shape than I imagined. The weeds, dry and yellow, come up to my knees, tangled with thistles and wild grasses that have forced their way up between the pavers of the walkway. The old lemon tree is still there, but its branches sag and its fruit is small and hard. The wooden deck running along the house has gone gray—three or four boards have given way, and the rest are warped.

No buyer in their right mind will last more than two minutes here.

The whole thing needs weeding, pruning, pulling out what’s dead, replanting whatever can be saved. Replacing the damaged boards. Sanding, maybe. Or tearing it all out and starting from scratch. My brain runs the numbers—labor hours, cost of materials, return on investment.

Turn a problem into an action plan.

Voices from the surf school carry over the fence. Kids shouting, the slap of a board, a burst of laughter. The noise is right there, constant, impossible to ignore. Ryan wasn’t wrong. For anyone looking for peace and quiet... forget it.

I head down the walkway, overrun with weeds. At the end, the gate.

Wood bleached by the salt air, a rusted hinge, a latch I could open with my eyes closed. It’s the same gate I used to push through ten times a day, at eight, at thirteen, at seventeen—the border between the house and the beach, between my family’s closed-off world and the vast open world of the ocean.

My hand settles on the latch. I stop.

The wind is soft, the sky a fierce blue. The air smells of salt and warm sand. I tip my head back and close my eyes. For a few seconds, there’s no house to sell, no Ryan, no noise. Just the sun and the ocean.